TL;DR:

We’re launching a collaborative effort to contextualize EVM transactions. You can check out the repository here.

Introduction

Blockchain transactions are hard to understand. The challenge is that transactions are strings of bytes, a complex structure that lacks real-world context.

The responsibility of extracting relevant data from transactions and determining how best one can express what happened falls on the shoulders of the developers. Composability is a core value of blockchains, however, new protocols don’t have a good way to enable their transactions to show up in a similar way across wallets, browsing tools, and data aggregators. This creates fragmented and frustrating experiences for users.

This can be much easier than it is today. Our goal is to work with the broader community to create a standard library for contextualizing transactions which can be used by a wide array of applications.

Problems & Challenges

Without context, we lose the significance of discontinued applications like Leeroy, and we lose the ability to understand recent platforms like Fren Pet outside of the app.

Leeroy

Leeroy was an innovative social dApp on Ethereum that launched in 2017. It was similar to Twitter but with a twist where the creators could receive tips for their posts. Leeroy showed the transactions on their smart contract in a clear way within their own app. If you were a user, your posts are lost in the inscrutable bytes of the blockchain. This represents a loss of a piece of Ethereum's story, akin to missing chapters from a history book.

Fren Pet

Similar to Leeroy, Fren Pet is a recent onchain game whose smart contracts allow for users to own a Tamagotchi-like character and compete against other players. The transactions onchain are nuanced and the context is only understandable via obtaining an invite and exploring the data within the app itself.

These examples demonstrate that it’s crucial to unearth the stories and intentions behind blockchain transactions. It should be easier to be an “onchain historian”, preserving context and meaning for future generations.

A Community-Driven Solution

Our aim with this open-source effort is to give everyone the fundamental tools to build on top of a new contextualized format.

We're introducing the open-source EVM Context library to standardize the process of contextualizing transactions.

This library allows you to see labeled actions, relevant variables, and concise summaries, turning raw blockchain data into easily understandable narratives.

Examples of Contextualized Data

Leeroy

🔗 link

Fren Pet

🔗 link

Join Our Open Source Initiative

The contextualized format has numerous use cases beyond human-readable transactions, benefiting indexers and developers.

Explore Once Upon to see contextualization in action and start understanding your own onchain activities.

We invite you to contribute to EVM Context and help shape the future of context-driven transactions for everyone.

Contextualizing Onchain Transactions: A Community-Driven Approach